Sorry, but this should have been posted in DOSBox Games/Apps forum.

Moved.

Supposedly it should just work, as long as you type

1VER SET 3 30

before running it.

I tried again with VER SET 3 30, but still the same error.

Make sure you're mounting the source drive (A) with the "-t floppy" switch; the setup program is known to act up if you neglect that.

I set a folder on C to act as the A drive, e.g: subst a: c:\win1setp

mount a c:\win1setp -t floppy

Only put files for one disk at a time in the folder that acts like a floppy. Start with files for disk 1, when the setup asks for disk 2 then use the host OS to delete all files in the folder and copy in files for disk 2, and so forth. The general idea is to simulate conditions the setup program was designed to work in.

Might need to add the label flag. I remember that some versions of DOS installers looking for a certain disk label as a primitive disk check.

I just tried it with Windows 1.01 and it works fine. I used disk images and used the disk-swap hotkey method to do the installation.

This method requires dosbox-svn, or one of the forks that extends dosbox-svn (dosbox ece, dosbox-x, dosbox staging).

Here is my config file:

1[serial]
2serial1=serialmouse
3
4[autoexec]
5mount c .
6PATH=%PATH%;C:\WINDOWS
7ver set 3 20
8imgmount a DISK1-SETUP.IMG DISK2-BUILD.IMG DISK3-UTILITY.IMG DISK4-APPS.IMG DISK5-WRITE.IMG
9C:

Note: the serial1=serialmouse will not work unless your using DOSBox-X, in which case you can select the MS Serial mouse during setup.

As an additional exercise, to see if I can speed up the install without having to worry about disk swaps. I copied the contents of all 5 disks into a directory and mounted that directory as A: and ran setup from it. This worked fine. So the disk LABEL is not used by the setup program.

1mount c winroot
2mount a winroot/install -t floppy
3ver set 3 20
4A:
5SETUP

And with dosbox-x I can even print (tested with paint and word) from Windows 1.01, if I select the Epson MX-80 during setup.

For this I had to add the following lines to my config.

1[parallel]
2parallel1=printer
3
4[printer]
5multipage=true
6timeout=5000

When printing this will cause a "page1.png" file to be created in the current directory.

An install program working with files from all floppies dumped into a folder is a case-by-case kind of thing. Even though it works in this case, where it obviously won't work is files of the same name on different disks and the content is not the same in all of them. In regards to the Win1 setup program, it can kind of "freak out" if the "-t floppy" switch is not used with the source drive, I think because of the amount of total/free space reported, which is apparently what the OP encountered.

FYI, the mouse works in DOSBox 0.74 or SVN if you substitute the MOUSE.DRV from Win2, which supports the PS/2 interface.

Yeah, I was not sure if dumping the contents of all the disks into one directory would work, for the same reasons you mentioned. In fact, because it requires -t floppy, I was expecting it to fail. But instead it works fine, and this way you don't even need to use DOSBox SVN for the disk-swap support.

Regarding the mouse, another way would be to use the special IBM OEM version of Windows 1.04 (or it's mouse driver). As it has support for PS/2 mouse (and VGA, although the option is called "IBM Personal System/2 Model 50, 60, 80" during setup).